Apply to Speak

Thank you for your applications!

We’re going to be reviewing the applications over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll be in touch with you soon!

Rules for Speakers

Selection: TEDx Organizers are responsible for procuring and handling their own speakers. TED staff do not help identify or secure speakers.

Event organizers: Organizers cannot be speakers at events to which they contribute.

Payment: TEDx events may never pay speakers. No one can pay to be included in the program. Speakers at your event cannot sponsor any part of your event, in-kind or otherwise.

Sponsors: Sponsors of your event cannot be speakers and can never present from the stage. See Sponsorship rules.

Duration: No talk can exceed 18 minutes in length.

Presentations: Every talk’s content must be in compliance with copyright law. Speakers must inform you beforehand of any third-party material that will be used in their presentations and seek written permissions to copyrighted materials when applicable. TED cannot assist with this process or act as a consultant on individual cases.

Speaker waiver: All of your speakers, performers and other stage presenters must sign this permission release form, giving TED and others the right to edit and distribute video of their presentation. Please keep for your records, and send to TED only upon request.

Filming: Every talk must be filmed and uploaded to the TEDxTalks YouTube channel (see Video rules). If the talk falls outside the content guidelines, organizers may withhold the talk. If an organizer chooses to withhold a talk, they are fully responsible for informing TED staff and then for communicating the reasoning of their actions to the speakers.

Content: If talks break the Content Guidelines, we reserve the right to insist on their removal from TEDx branded distribution outlets, and license renewal is unlikely.

No commercial agenda. Speakers should not promote their own products, books, or businesses or those of a company which employs them. The only exception is where they have specifically been invited to give a powerful product demo, or to describe the ideas in their book, and here the focus should still be on the technology and/or the ideas.

Avoid pseudoscience. TED and TEDx are platforms for showcasing and explaining genuine advances in science, and it’s important we retain the respect of the scientific community. Speakers should avoid the misuse of scientific language to make unsubstantiated claims.

No talks with an inflammatory political or religious agenda, nor for polarizing “us vs them” language. We seek to build consensus and provide outside-the-box thinking, not to revisit familiar, unresolvable disputes on these topics.

Speaker products: Speakers’ books can be part of the selection at a TEDx event bookstore, but they cannot sell books or other items individually.

Book signings: Speakers at TEDx events can sign their books, but only as part of a larger book sale, and bookstore presence.